i7-965 w gtx285 15fps!

[viper3two]

Hi

I have been enjoying the heck out of dcs...so much so that I built a new system for it. I had a Q6600 at 2.4ghz, an 8800gts 640mb running xp pro. I would average 18-20 fps in the pit in the shooting range mission. I built an i7-965 extreme, 6 gigs corsair dominator, gtx285 1gb with vista ultimate 64 bit. Now with the same mission, same gfx settings, I am getting a whopping 15fps on average. lol. Here is what I have on the new system, maybe someone can spot something?

i7-965 extreme. 6gigs corsair dominator. evga gtx285 1gb. sb extreme music, vista ultimate. All drivers on motherboard, vid card and sound card are the latest out there.

I have tried the prifinitty and dcs affinity tool, it actually makes the fps worse....

In the game everything is set to high, which I should be able to run. mirrors are on, water is on high (yea I know its an fps killer, but my old rig would do faster than this one with water high), 1024 on the cockpit textures...everything max.

In Flight Sim X, for example, I had most of my sliders set on about 75%, a little above normal but no way I could run max, I usually got around 25fps on an average. Now with the new system, I get probably 50-60fps, with everything as max as it will go. First person shooters are in the 90's to 100 whatevers lol, so I'm thinking this must be something I don't have set right in BS? Not sure.....

vid card settings are set to aa 8xQ, anis is set to 16x, no verticle sync. Tried changing to vericle sync, no change in BS.....

Anyone have an idea? I think with what hardware I have I should be seeing 40-50fps without issues in this sim.

Thanks for the help

[Slayer]

You should definately be getting better framerates than that. As for the water put that back to it's default setting, you can hardly tell the difference anyways and it will impact your performance even if you can't see water on the screen.

 

The big one alot of people miss is the Full Screen checkbox in the graphics settings, you will get bad FPS if it's in window mode.

 

Since your on Vista now I would also suggest searching the forum for the CPU affinity trick, this should get you about 10-15 more FPS. It works only on Vista and many people are having very good increases using this

 

In Vista unless the game specifically has a setting built in to disable Vsync, you cannot turn it off. The setting in the Nvidia control panel will only affect OpenGL aplications. So this won't help you with FPS.

 

For your Nvidia profile are you using global settings or did you make a new profile for DCS?

 

Something else to check is the CPU throttling in your BIOS under power management. Try turning off those options and see what happens. I suspect your CPU is not switching to full speed. It's usually a setting called TM1 and TM2(Thermal management) Also check to see if your board auto configured your CPU properly .

[hitman]

You might have your Shkval and ABRIS monitor resolutions set abnormally high. I have mine set at 512...you dont need that kind of resolution unless your using them on a different monitor.

[Kuky]

Those new intel i7 chips are nothing faster in games compared to Core2 chips, in fact in some games they perform even a tad slower. You running on absolute max graphics setting and all in game options turned on to maximum will be too much for your system but still I think you should be getting bit more than 15FPS average. I run my E8500 at 3.8GHz and I get average 35FPS in DCS with single HD4870. Mind you I don't use water on high and both my CPU and VGA are better (in this game) then i& at 3.2GHz and 8800GTS. So turn down that water to normal, I suggest you don't use mirrors also as I personally don't find them usefull at all... and you should be getting 30FPS-ish average. You could also run 4xAA and 8xAF (if you're running high resolution monitor) and game will stil look very nice.

[viper3two]

Slayer and Hitman, thanks for the replies. I first tried setting the texture to 512 instead of 1024 every frame, and it helped...very little...I saw maybe a frame or 2 at the most better. I checked the water and it was set to high, and still just a little bit of difference, I am seeing now about 18fps in the pit in the shooting range mission. Blah! lol......BS is set to full screen. I unchecked this and got out of BS, back in and set it to full screen. Back out and back in just to see if the setting stuck, it is showing and displaying fullscreen.

 

I tried both Prifinitty and the dcs black shark affinity programs, the dcs bs affinity gives me an error about not supporting 8 cores -), but I see hardly anything with either program when running those, I may get lucky and hit 20 fps.......-(

 

As far as the NVidia settings and stuff, I got the latest driver from evga and installed it again, no change, it was the same as I had (182.06). Next up I checked my nvidia control panel. I have not set a profile for the game, I just changed my default settings under that. The things that I changed were: disable vertical sync, antialiasing is set to 8XQ and force it on the application, and Anistrophy is set to 16x. Thats the only things I have changed and that is what I had it set to on my old box. Not sure if I am doing something wrong there?

 

And lastly...the BIOS and processor. I checked the EVGA E-LEET software that came with the x58 board, and have the latest bios upgrade from evga. E-LEET says its an i-965 running at 3.20ghz, and checking under task manager it shows all 8 cores with hardly nothing using the memory or processor. When I run BS, however, it shows about 16% processor usage. Not sure if that is right or not.

I took a look in the power management section of BIOS for the CPU throttling settings, could not find anything mentioning the TM1 or 2 or cpu throttling....However, I found some rather interesting stuff in the Frequency/Voltage control section. Maybe something is not set right here?? Here is what is listed:

Dummy O.C.=Disabled (I have no idea what dummy overclock means or is, I will see if I can find this on the EVGA forum...it is an X58 3XSLI board).

Extreme Cooling=Disabled (I am not overclocking anything....new build, want to let it settle a bit before I try anything lol)

Memory Control Setting=Enabled

Memory Frequency=Auto

Channel Interleave Setting=6 way

Memory Low Gap=Auto

All the next are set to AUTO: tCL, tRCD, tRP, tRAS,tRFC, Command Rate, tRRD, tFAW, tRTP, tWR, Round Trip Latency, tddWrTRd, tdrWrTRd, tsrWrTRd,tddRdTWr,tdrRdTWr,tsrRdTWr,tddRdTRd,tdrRdTRd,tsrRdTRd,tddWrTWr,tdrWrTWr,tsrWrTWr.

Voltage Control:

EVGA VDroop Control=With VDroop

CPU VCore, CPU VTT Voltage, CPU PLL Vcore, DIMM Voltage all are set AUTO.

DIMM DQ Vref=+0mV

QPI PLL VCore, IOH VCore, IOH/ICH I/O Voltage, ICH VCore all set to AUTO.

PWM Frequency=800 KHz.

CPU Feature: <This is interesting.......

Intel Speed Step=Disabled.....<--should this be enabled?

Turbo Mode Function=Enabled

CxE Function= DIsabled

Execute Disable Bit=Enabled

Virtualization Technology=Disabled

Intel HT Technology=Enabled

Active Processor Cores=All

QPI Control settings and QPI Link Fast Mode=Enabled

QPI Frequency Selection=Auto

 

CPU Clock Ratio=24X

CPU Host Frequency=133

MCH Strap and CPU Uncore Frequency both set to Auto

Spread Spectrum=Disabled

PCIE Frequency Mhz=100

 

 

Hate to make this a LONNNNNNNNG reply, I just have no idea about what all those things are in the BIOS, and really afraid to touch anything since it is brand new....I don't know alot about overclocking and all those settings.......

But maybe someone can spot something that is set wrong?

BTW, it is an i7-965 extreme on an EVGA X-58 3XSLI board, with the SZ1N (latest) bios from evga. I flashed it the first night I put it together. Flashed with no errors.

 

Thanks for helping!

[viper3two]

And Kuky too! Thanks for the reply. I set DCS to no mirrors, AA to 4x, AF to 8x and that helped quite a bit but still not as much as I think it should...or maybe Im thinkin wrong lol. I am now up to 23 fps in the pit unpaused in the shooting range mission. I think if I saw 30fps I would cry at this point LOL.... Anyways, that helped a bunch...just still feels like to me that something is keeping this beast from unleashing it's power!

Thanks again

[DragonRR]

I tried both Prifinitty and the dcs black shark affinity programs, the dcs bs affinity gives me an error about not supporting 8 cores -)

 

 

Maybe that's your problem, the i7 supports hyperthreading so you have 4 real cores plus 4 "virtual" hyperthreaded cores. Have you tried manually forcing affinity by alt-tabbing, running taskmanager and setting DCS.exe to use all the cores?

 

BTW.. The i7 isn't clock for clock slower the comment by Kuky (no offense Kuky!) applied to early engineering samples with early revision mainboards. The i7 is up to 17% faster than the core2duo equivalent. Obviously BS COULD be an exception but I think it unlikely.

 

You should have no real problems with AF at 16x, AA at 2x or more, mirrors on, everything on max except water. I don't (have problems) and I run at 2560x1600 on a QX9650, Nvidia 280. I suspect overall my system maybe SLIGHTLY quicker with BS than yours because I run the QX9650 at 3.9ghz. I get between 40 & 50fps (generally) FYI.

Edited March 3, 2009 by DragonRR

[viper3two]

Lemme give that a go.....post back in a few mins.....

Thanks Dragon

[Kuky]

16% CPU usage is about right (1/8th of the CPU as it has 4 cores and HT makes it look as if it has 8 cores). You don't have any background aplications like virus scans running? One more thing you could check is when you are in game, enable built in frame counter (keys: CTRL + Pause/Break). Press this key combination twice so you're able to see more details in this frame counter... keep a look at how many objects it's counting in this counter... if it starts getting in 5000 objects and more it starts having big imspact on framerate (CPU being the limiting factor) For every double number of objects (aproximately) you'll see your framerate get halfed. If you see number of objecs starts rising into 10000 or more you could manually set distance at which you can see objects and reduce it, or objects density. Now I can't remember now where this is set in DCS, in LockOn it's in Graphics.cfg file.

 

Also keep in mind when you have Shkval TV on it also shows more objects in it, making objects count almost double if you have it looking towards cities or large number of vehicles. Play around with a bit and see how you go.

Edited March 3, 2009 by Kuky

[viper3two]

Holy mother of god...LOL...I hit 54.1 FPS in the pit!!!!

Ahhhhh....now its actin like it should!!!

Here is what I did:

Took Kuky's advise and turned down the distance draw to medium, tried it again, that helped a bit more...I actually hit 30 fps there. Mirrors are off, water is off. That Shval is definately noticable in the fps hits as well, turned it down to 512 for now. Tried it again, now in the mid 30's in the pit.

Next up I tried fiddling with AA and AF. I turned it down to AA4x, AF8x, with no real speedup or difference. Cranked that back up to AA8XQ, AF16X, same frames there.......

I think the biggest jump I saw is with the manual Set Affinity. Thanks Dragon!!! For some reason when I used prifinitty and dcs affinity tool, neither before would give me much difference. dcs affinity tool gave some error about not supporting 8 cores, then it would show a strange error on line -1? window that would pop up. Prifinity for some reason, would not stick the settings. I would set it to cores 0-7 and high priority, then save it, set to auto. When I got in BS, I saw that DCS was set to just the 0 core (single). Not sure what was going on with either of those...

But I got it to stick using Task Manager. Fired up DCS again and then when I was in the mission, jumped out, set affinity to cores 0-7 (all) and back in. Saw it go from 30fps to 54.1!! Then zoomed in a little (I was all the way wide) and I hit 62 fps.....WOW!!! I got over 100fps in outside view zoomed back a little as well.......

Thanks so much for everybody's help....

I just thought it was something I didn't have set right in the sim or on the box.......

That made a tremendous difference. No more jerking/lag either! Woot.....

 

(now maybe one day I will put that e-leet overclocking tool to use lol)

 

Thanks again

Edited March 3, 2009 by viper3two

[viper3two]

One quick question about something I noticed. While cruising in the bios, I saw the mem timing set to 1333mhz. I have the corsair dominator that says 1600 on the box. would it hurt or gain anything by changing that in bios to 1600? Thanks

[Slayer]

Glad to hear.....I should've mentioned that too I always have to use task manager to set affinity because prifinity wont auto set it. The script I got from the forums works 1 time ( until a mission ends then I start a new one ) Anything that takes you out of the 3d world and back to the menu requires you to reapply the affinity :/

 

The speedstep in your BIOS slows down the CPU when it's not being used. A must for notebooks to conserve battery power but for desktops....nah

[EtherealN]

viper3two, be very careful with that memory setting in BIOS. The numbers in BIOS and the numbers you nominally use are not always the same. As an example, my RAMsticks are running at 1092 MHz while CPU-Z displays them as 546.4MHz. They are double data rate sticks though so 546,4x2=1092,8.

 

My BIOS will allow settings to be made with the "product" number, but not all BIOSes will. It saying 1333MHz should indicate that it is using the final number wherefore it should be allright to increase it, but doublecheck the memory modules first through CPU-Z (google it) and in the program open the SPD tab.

 

In there you will have a bunch of information on the memory sticks, including a "timings table" with columns for JEDEC #1, JEDEC #2, EPP #1 and EPP#2. In there you will see various frequencies and timing settings that are officially supported by the chip - CPU-Z reads them from the JEDEC chip on the RAMstick.

 

When I built this machine I noticed that my 800MHz sticks had defaulted to the JEDEC 2 setting of 400MHz (that is, 800MHz with the double data rate) and 5-5-5-18-23 Timings. EPP #1 gave me the option of 400MHz and 4-4-4-12-24-2T (2volt), and EPP #2 offered 500MHz and 5-5-5-15-30-2T. Notable is that JEDEC#1 setting was actually an underclock setting of 333MHz and 4-5-5-15-20 stepping. It is possible that your RAMsticks just defaulted to a similar underclock setting.

 

Write these things down and head back into the bios and progressively test higher settings. If your chip is EPP-enabled which I believe they should be, they should be quite allright with any of them, but go slowly upwards anyhow just to be safe. (I also recommend getting Orthos and running it's CPU & RAM stress test while monitoring temperatures, just to ensure that there is no instability in the system.)

 

So ehm, to make a short summary version: your RAMsticks are probably fine with going faster and likely just defaulted to an underclock setting present on it's JEDEC. Upclocking it to standard speed should be allright, but might require you to change some numbers on the timings table. The BIOS might also be able to automatically adjust these numbers to fit the clock frequency you choose, like my mobo, but I always like doing things myself.

[hitman]

Holy mother of god...LOL...I hit 54.1 FPS in the pit!!!!

Ahhhhh....now its actin like it should!!!

Here is what I did:

Took Kuky's advise and turned down the distance draw to medium, tried it again, that helped a bit more...I actually hit 30 fps there. Mirrors are off, water is off. That Shval is definately noticable in the fps hits as well, turned it down to 512 for now. Tried it again, now in the mid 30's in the pit.

Next up I tried fiddling with AA and AF. I turned it down to AA4x, AF8x, with no real speedup or difference. Cranked that back up to AA8XQ, AF16X, same frames there.......

I think the biggest jump I saw is with the manual Set Affinity. Thanks Dragon!!! For some reason when I used prifinitty and dcs affinity tool, neither before would give me much difference. dcs affinity tool gave some error about not supporting 8 cores, then it would show a strange error on line -1? window that would pop up. Prifinity for some reason, would not stick the settings. I would set it to cores 0-7 and high priority, then save it, set to auto. When I got in BS, I saw that DCS was set to just the 0 core (single). Not sure what was going on with either of those...

But I got it to stick using Task Manager. Fired up DCS again and then when I was in the mission, jumped out, set affinity to cores 0-7 (all) and back in. Saw it go from 30fps to 54.1!! Then zoomed in a little (I was all the way wide) and I hit 62 fps.....WOW!!! I got over 100fps in outside view zoomed back a little as well.......

Thanks so much for everybody's help....

I just thought it was something I didn't have set right in the sim or on the box.......

That made a tremendous difference. No more jerking/lag either! Woot.....

 

(now maybe one day I will put that e-leet overclocking tool to use lol)

 

Thanks again

 

I say somehing is wrong still. I have an i7 920 o/c to 3.7ghz and I average 60fps with all settings (except monitors) at max resolutions and max textures, with 16xAA and 16xAF. I set the affinity to all 8 cores and my fps increases even more. I would try another benchmark in BS to make certain its the settings and not the missions.

[viper3two]

Ethereal, thanks for that information! I got to looking over at evga as well and there is somebody who has the same situation, his memory detected at 1030mhz, but he is running the dominators just as I am. I will probably get a chance after work to mess around with the clock on the memory, and hopefully the board will adjust the timings for me. I will take your advise and step it slowly and check results. Will post back and let you know how this goes.

Hitman, I agree (hate to say that) with ya, although I got it going to the mid 50's in the pit, I still think it ought to be a little more than that considering what I have. What mission are you running when you check your machine? I will try tonight to go back and set full AA and AF, all graphics up and see what I get in the same mission. I saw you have an oc'd 920....how much mem and what vid card do you have? Thanks!

[hitman]

My specs are in my sig below. I usually use the demo missions to check FPS with FRAPS. I also go online and use the 159th from time to time and check fps there as well. Most of the time, the bad FPS comes from when the game is loading textures, but when the textures are finally in memory, my FPS increases to around 60 at startup.

 

I suggest overclocking your chip, believe it or not. You can o/c safely to 3.7 easily, and that will increase your memory speed to 1450mhz. It may be below stock speed, but thats probably where the biggest hit of performance that you are seeing is coming from. Heres my thread on that subject, shows you what to do and how to do it. Keep in mind its not a 965, so you might not have to increase voltages.

http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=37465&highlight=overclocking+i7

Edited March 3, 2009 by hitman

[viper3two]

Thanks hitman for that link, I am all new to this overclocking stuff and gonna give it a go and see what happens! I surely will see an increase in performance. I will post back and let ya know how it goes, might take me a bit of reading to figure everything out but will let ya know. Thanks again to all in this thread for the help!

[Slayer]

One quick question about something I noticed. While cruising in the bios, I saw the mem timing set to 1333mhz. I have the corsair dominator that says 1600 on the box. would it hurt or gain anything by changing that in bios to 1600? Thanks

 

You should be able to run it at provided your motherboard supports it. Some new x58 boards only support 1333. The best way to go about it is to goto the manufacturers website and lookup your memory and get the timings they used to get to 1600.

[Mugatu]

Nehalem Xeons have hit the mac pros for those cashed up.

[mckee14]

check your FPS in a empty mission, not in a mission full with units and/or triggers.

 

the developers mentioned, that there is a problem with the adressing of RAM by VISTA. the problem is VISTA-related and -based, and only MS can do something about it... that's the reason, why in the new campaigns (which come with the english version) there is a warning, that these campaings will only work with XP and not with vista.

 

just to make sure that not the OS is the limiting factor, and you spend hours with testing :)

 

and one word to the overclocking - in the last years, it became really easy to overclock, and most processors and even grafic cards can get clocked up a goot notch with "no problems". I also have oc'ed my processor, but you should still be aware:

- your guarantee is gone. if a part is dying, you have to buy a new one.

- the lifespan of the oc'ed parts IS SHORTER. maybe the part will last for 4 years (instead of 6, or 8 years without oc'ing), but maybe it will be dead in 1 year... which also means, you have to buy a new one.

- even if you test all the parts with benchmarks for hours with no problems, there is always the chance that "something" will not work like it should. with oc'ed parts, you will have to go back to default settings with every single error happening, just to make sure it has nothing to do with it.

 

all my apps/games are running well with my actual processor, but when i oc'ed my older core2duo, everything exept MS FSX went well. took me quite a while to figure out, that the CTD's happening from time to time were related to it...

 

you can do it, it's not hard, it's not very risky, but i just be aware of the (possible) negative sides.

[viper3two]

hitman, slayer and mkee...

First up, thanks alot for all the input and replies, this is helping me alot!

I tinkered a little last night (before I saw mckee's post...now I'm wonderin if I should just leave it at stock hehehe) and first got the memory up to the correct speed. The bios that I flashed with opens up the mem speed on the board to support the 1600mhz. It changed to the correct mhz with no issues at all. Rebooted and tested with the same mission, and I saw a slight increase in speed, maybe about 2 fps. I believe I hit around 56fps.

The mission I am using is the Shooting Range. I tried a few more missions at the above settings and saw that some were slightly higher, some were not. Make sense about testing with something that is not packed with triggers! I will get a bare mission and try it tonight to see the difference.

Next I thought I would try to overclock a little just to see what happens. There is a cool little feature in the EVGA x58 bios called "dummy o.c.". I read up on it and it pretty much will give you a stable 3.6ghz without having to manually change any settings. I do want to manually change them once I figure out everything, there is a lot to learn before doing this lol.

So I booted back into vista, ran the e-leet program and the computer properties both said I was at 3.6ghz with 1600mhz memory. coolness. I also went into NVidia and cranked the AA and AF all the way up to 16x for both. Went back into the same mission and hit 65-68 fps in the pit, anywheres from 90 to 130 outside! Wow what a difference! It was sooooo smooth flying at those fps's...I could tell a big difference than when I first had the issue. I also tried one of the other missions that I found on the site, I think the title was Day One...a basic mission with not a lot of stuff in it. fps in the pit was a steady 75........

I think I will probably leave it at 3.6 for now, don't want to go too extreme with it. I do have an ultra 120 (TRUE) air cooler and temps on the cpu were around 48C after being in the mission for about 20 mins.

Thanks again for all the help...this has solved the issue!

Edited March 4, 2009 by viper3two

[EtherealN]

mckee14, as far as I know the warning in the Georgian Oil War campaign regarding Vista will be removed with the upcoming patch. It was placed there because issues were discovered during beta testing, but since so many on this forum found it baseless in the retail product ED has decided to rescind the warning.

 

The campaigns work perfectly for me on both of my machines, one being a dated laptop running Vista32 and the other a newer build running Vista64(see sig).

 

Another note is that you should not "test" the parts with benchmarks. They are made to approximate and compare the actual performance of a component towards a given purpose. What you need to do is stress-test, which is something else and "simply" gives the component a rediculously massive workload and keeps track of the results to ensure that there are no errors. Prime95 is an example of the latter and is one of the methods used by the Orthos application, 3Dmark and PCmark are examples of benchmarks.

 

(If by "benchmark" you actually meant a stress-test, then please disregard the above. I do however think that the distinction in application and methodology between the two is such that you want to ensure minimal confusion between them.)

 

The note about guarantees is also true but with a caveat - I believe most high-end producers of E.P.P-enabled memory modules do allow overclocking to be covered by their warranty as long as you stick to the profiles given in the JEDEC chip. (My own RAMsticks are quite obviously toasted for warranty though. :P )

 

And finally, the original issue here was not that he needed to overclock, it was the fact that his sticks appeared to be underclocked. The warranty cannot be voided by bringing the product up to it's design specification.

[EtherealN]

Oh, and Viper3two, if you want to read up on some basics, this here is an article I myself found quite helpful: http://techreport.com/articles.x/13815

[viper3two]

Thanks Ethereal, appreciate the link. I checked with EVGA on their site and yes that is why they came out with the updated bios because before it only went to 1333mhz and the dominators support 1600, so I am leaving it set to the 1600. I have so so much to learn about all this overclocking, I am going to start by giving your link a read through. You know that kinda makes sense, why would EVGA put an option in their bios to overclock as well as give you software to do it if they didn't mean for you to overclock? Same thing with their video card i have. The utility that comes with it has the sliders to increase the clock/mem speed. I guess it is ok to do this as long as I keep a big eye on temps and don't do nothing way out of the ordinary. You know I have been messing around with computers for some time and I kinda laughed when I saw the dominator memory, it had heat sinks on the chips lol....I guess they are meant to be pushed a little -)

Thanks again

[TorwaK]

Those new intel i7 chips are nothing faster in games compared to Core2 chips, in fact in some games they perform even a tad slower.

 

Kuky if you run 2000 model game which is Lock-On on Corei7, of course you can't get high performance from the game. Give a try with Crysis, Death Space, Fallout 3 etc. Corei7 has really huge CPU power capability in games, especially which supports multi threads. I've double O/S at my PC and I use windows xp (32-bit) just for LO to get better FPS than Vista (64-bit)